


Sugar, We’re Going Down (or, Five Ways Castiel Fell for Dean)

by agirlnamedtruth



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-19
Packaged: 2017-11-04 23:05:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agirlnamedtruth/pseuds/agirlnamedtruth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel counts the all the ways he falls after a comment made by another Angel. Blanket spoilers for Seasons 4-7. Specific spoilers for 7x21.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Doubt and Rebellion

Angels shouldn’t have emotions. They couldn’t even understand them. Most had no desire to change that. But Castiel was different.

He could say that was because his garrison were charged with watching the humans and by proxy that meant he was too. As their leader, he had to set an example. He had to make his soldiers believe they were interesting and loveable and worth saving. He didn’t know if they were or not, but it was a line he had to sell. He made it through millennia watching humankind, from their first steps out of the cave to their first steps into brick houses with satellite television (or as he saw it, back into the cave). So, he would be lying if he said that had been what changed him. It hadn’t.

The strange thing was he could watch a whole race of people, the whole species and not _feel_ He didn’t connect to them, he couldn’t empathize and he couldn’t be witness to what they were feeling because it was impossible to hear one voice amongst the billions. He supposed that was why prayers were rarely answered.

The truth was he had to have one of them, for himself. He had to go down and instead of walking amongst them, stop by one and choose them. Then that would be his human, so to speak. Angels that had done it swore by it. On the other hand, other Angels couldn’t cope with the sudden onslaught of _feelings_ and they inevitably fell, joining their human in earnest.

In 2008, Castiel finally found _his_ human. Not that he could ever call him that to his face, it’d offend his human dislike of ownership. But from Heaven’s point of view, the handprint Castiel had left on his shoulder was as good as a “property of Castiel, please do not touch” label.

He inadvertently took on his brother too. And his friends. And any other human being that associated with them. It was like a dam. He opened himself to one and they all came flooding in.

And with all the people came questions and he found some of them he couldn’t answer. Even some of the one’s he could answer gave him pause for thought. And all of this led to that all too spoken of emotion. The big scary one that nobody dared mutter within earshot of Heaven. _Doubt_.

Dean fuelled his doubt. He asked so many questions; made so many good points that Castiel had run out of ways to escape them. They turned over in his mind and he found himself siding with Dean more often than he sided with Heaven.

He remembered being sat on a park bench, across from him, absolutely terrified at confessing, for the first time ever that he had doubts. Those were small trivial doubts, nothing on the scale he was feeling now but it was such as wave of relief for Dean to accept that. He didn’t tell him off for being a bad Angel. He didn’t report him. He just _accepted it_.

Somewhere along the line he went from having questions to asking them, from not knowing what was right and wrong and making sure he knew and from having doubts to trusting those thoughts in the back of his head. Dean had taught him a lot could be learnt by going with his gut, even if it was borrowing it from a salesman from Illinois. 

Anna called him out on it. She recognized the signs. She saw her own struggle reflected in his eyes. She offered him support and scared, he threw it back at her. His doubts had been about Uriel and in the end they weren’t unfounded. Uriel had betrayed them. And Castiel couldn’t help thinking, if he’d been right about Uriel, what else could he be right about? Doubt had taken hold of him now and it wasn’t letting go.

It wasn’t infallible though. He had stumbles, where the millennia of conditioning would suddenly return to him, making him wish he could just go back to following orders. But every time he did, a little voice in his head, one that sounded appropriately like that of Dean Winchester whispered to him and made him, as the expression goes, see the light.

Eventually Heaven grew wise to what he was feeling. He was surprised they hadn’t felt his doubt sooner. To Heaven, doubt was like cancer, if they let it spread, the whole Host could be destroyed. They put their tried and tested methods of securing loyalty to use, like he knew they would. He endured under them for hours, had they been in real time. He only gave in so quickly because he was needed back on Earth. Had they done as thorough job as they usually did, he would have never been capable of doubt again.

He told Dean he didn’t serve man and he certainly didn’t serve him but that was as close to outright lying as an Angel could get. He’d been serving Dean since the moment he pulled him out of hell and he’d been serving man since they’d been pulled out of Eden. The smallest push and he’d drop it all for him.

The push came, sooner rather than later. It wasn’t strictly a push, it was a punch in the face and a lot of strong words but it did the trick. He waited until the last possible moment and then he freed himself from Heaven’s chains, by freeing Dean. He knew they’d come after him, to kill him but he no longer cared. He’d rather spend one second honestly with Dean than spend eternity a liar. If he’d had a way to, he would have ripped his grace out there and then, doing their job for them. Eventually Raphael caught up with him and he fell for the first time. 

Of course, he’d fallen since then and had been well informed by Dean that even in the future, he was fallen. Of course, people presume that falling automatically meant he’s no longer an Angel. That’s like saying when a human commits something inhuman, they cease to be psychically human. There are several executioners that can testify just how wrong that idea is.

Hester hit the proverbial nail on the head when she said “You have fallen in every way imaginable.”


	2. Denial and Distilled Ethanol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Alcohol abuse and one strong swear.

The second fall was much less heroic. Castiel couldn’t claim that it was for, or because of, someone else. He was his own undoing for a change.

If he really wanted to delegate the blame, like a child scared of admitting he’d done wrong, he could have blamed his Father. He’d been trained to obey orders and love Him and then suddenly there wasn’t a Him anymore and he was out of orders to follow. 

Of course, the easiest thing to do was to bury his head in the sand, after all that had served ostriches so well for all these years. Or at least the ones it didn’t never knew about their downfall. Or if they did, they could just ignore it. He couldn’t deny it was a system that worked for them.

So Castiel ignored everything his brother told him, everything that reason screamed like it was blindingly obvious. He even ignored Dean, determined that he would find Him. He took Dean’s pendant, not sure if he wanted it because it would help him or simply because it was Dean’s. The more he hesitated, the more Castiel wanted it. That indicated the latter. Eventually Dean gave in and gave it to him and Castiel wondered what that indicated. 

He searched so hard, he wasn’t sure he’d notice if God was standing right in front of him. He was so desperate to find Him that he didn’t even ask himself; why? For a while, his whole life revolved around it. In hindsight, he wished he could go back and tell himself he was only doing it because he didn’t know what else to do.

He’d rebelled. He’d been killed. He’d been brought back. He was hunted. He had no place to go. It had all been for nothing. Lucifer was free. And if he was honest with himself, he knew if he could swallow his pride, Sam and Dean would take him in, give him a purpose. But he wasn’t sure that was something he was allowed to ask for.

So, he fixated on God and somewhat put himself into Winchester rehabilitation. He’d still come when they called, he didn’t seem to ever be able to resist that but he no longer stayed longer than necessary, he didn’t let them in. The more he pushed them away, the more he clung onto this notion of finding God.

Somewhere deep down he knew it was a pointless mission. If nobody had seen Him, it was arrogant to think he’d be the one to find him.

Eventually, he drove at the idea to hard and it smashed. Joshua was the last stop on a road that had been getting steadily shorter since he took Dean’s pendant. He came screeching to a halt with nowhere left to go. Again. 

Up until then, finding God was like Schrodinger’s cats to him. If he didn’t know for sure that God was gone, then He had to be somewhere. The idea of one couldn’t be true without the other one carrying the same truth. He cursed himself for opening the box, so to speak, and finding God gone thus removing the possibility that He was there.

Therefore he found himself with only one corner of denial left to hide in. It so happened to be a very human way of coping and coincidentally Dean’s method of choice as well because let’s face it, everything came back to Dean.

For humans, the ability to purge oneself of every feeling, thought or memory is quite straightforward. They drink, they drown their sorrows and they try not to die of alcohol poisoning. 

For Angels, it was more complicated. They drank and nothing happened. Their vessels would absorb the alcohol and it would disappear into their bloodstream and his Grace, seeing this harmful substance for what it was, wouldn’t let it near him. It was like someone constantly taking the bottle away from him and tipping it away. Luckily for him, once you got past a quantity, something akin to what would kill a human, his Grace would give up, go and sit in a corner of his vessel and shake its head at him, disappointed. Of course, by this stage he was drunk, so take that with as much salt as one would a human swearing blind they saw pink elephants.

As it sometimes did with humans, alcohol gave him complete clarity and honesty. He did find the sound of Sam’s voice grating and more often than any polite person would point out, he did ask stupid questions. That sort of honesty was trivial though.

It was when he thought honestly that made pause. He realised a great many things. He didn’t really care where God was. He never had done, even when he was a good little soldier. He also realised the list of things he did care about had gotten substantially shorter since he’d laid his hand on Dean in hell. On that tangent, the list was scarily Dean-orientated. Which while he wasn’t exactly willing to admit that to anyone, even himself, it was no surprise. After all, every action he took these days was to aid and abet the Winchesters in some way or another. He couldn’t name any other human that he answered every prayer for. He couldn’t think of another Angel that had sacrificed everything for a human. Yet both applied to him and Dean. 

The Greeks had an idea that the gods, Zeus in particular, lived off of prayers. To the point that they would wither and become powerless without them. Castiel wondered if the same thing was happening to him. The longer he spent resenting the Winchesters for his own actions, the weaker he became, the less alcohol it took to soothe him into placidity. 

Or maybe he fed from Dean’s soul, like they were truly bonded. If that was the case, he was apparently fucked. Dean’s words, not his. Of course, the context in which Castiel was thinking about Dean’s soul was completely different but there was no denying that something inside Dean was broken.

Dean had told him a little of what their future was like. Dean had become something so broken and twisted that it had fractured his soul just to see himself like that. He was told that he himself had fallen into drugs and decadence. Castiel would look sideways at the several empty bottles and be willing to believe that. With the world ending like it was and how fast he was falling, he would believe anything.

By some late stage in the game formerly known as the apocalypse, he fell further than he could rise from. Somewhere along the line, he committed an act dubbed by Dean as ‘some self-sacrificing bullshit’ and he found himself no more divine that Dean. Probably, if he was examined closely, less so. 

Somewhere in between being flung from Dean and waking up in a hospital bed, he’d lost any form of resentment and pride that he’d had. He lost the urge to bury his head in the ground. He no longer thought ignorance and oblivion was bliss.

This time when he fell, he fell back into Dean’s arms. Metaphorically speaking, of course.


	3. A Short Lived God Complex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Strong language and somewhat suicidal thoughts.

The second he pressed his fingers to Sam’s head, he fell irreversibly. Both in his own eyes and Dean’s too, he feared.

But he was doing the greater good. Raphael couldn’t rule so by proxy he had to. He didn’t know he was the one tying the hangman’s noose with the length of rope he’d dubbed freedom. 

Dean didn’t understand and that had been a severe price to pay but the choice wasn’t made by him. Besides, he was convinced that Dean would thank him in the end, when the world had been saved. It had been a difficult moment when he felt Dean’s faith in him drain away but his faith in the future, in his future consoled him.

With each sin he committed, he held a thought of Dean in his mind. He was doing all this for him, for his world, for his notion of peace. When his hands became stained red with blood and every fiber of his being was disgusted with himself, he chanted Dean’s name in his head like a mantra.

He didn’t so much think he was falling as acknowledged he’d hit the bottom. He resigned himself to the fact that at least he couldn’t fall any further.

He was proved wrong when he felt the angel blade slide through his vessel, Sam wielding it. For a minute, he’d expected to die and he hadn’t. It filled him with a newfound faith; he had done the right thing. 

He played with the idea of _making_ them love him before he realised he was being childish. If they didn’t love him as their God already then he would have to prove himself. He would fix their broken world. Then they would love him.

He tried, in his own misguided way. He punished sinners and rewarded the faithful but did it all without any form of conviction. They were clichéd acts taken straight out of the Old Testament. That was what a new God was _supposed_ to do. That what his Father had done _before_ him. He couldn’t even claim ownership over his own actions, not really. 

And all they did was cause chaos. There was a reason the Old Testament became the New, after all. It was that chaos the Leviathan inside him loved and yearned to create more of. Each sin he committed only served to make them stronger and more quickly than he had anticipated, they broke free of him. They overtook him and committed unspeakable acts, but only marginally worse than those he’d done since absorbing them.

He stood for a while, surrounded by corpses, feeling them push and pull his vessel to near breaking point, trying to convince himself he could control them. His pride still appeared to something he couldn’t swallow.

It wasn’t facing Dean that scared him. It wasn’t even being told that he was wrong and that he should have listened because despite himself, he couldn’t deny that anymore. It was the fear that Dean would turn him away. It was the fear that a line had been crossed and he could never uncross it.

The longer he waited the worse it became. He could hear Sam’s voice in the back of his head, praying for him. Had it been Dean, he would already be at his side. But it wasn’t, so he didn’t move.

He caught sight of himself reflected in one of the large windows, a ghost of red and beige, stumbling towards itself until one red hand pressed against its duller counterpart.

He looked at himself. His vessel was barely capable of holding everything in. The sickening thought of what would happen should his vessel fail flickered through his mind. They would escape; he’d be powerless to stop them. He wouldn’t even be able to tell anyone until he secured the consent of a new vessel and that could take longer than the world had. Then he’d have to face Dean, explain that not only had he completely fucked up, he’d destroyed Jimmy _again_ in the process.

He looked inside himself, searching for that tiny spark that once had owned this body. He found him in a dark corner, abused and skittish. Castiel cursed himself for not thinking to protecting him. 

What should I do, he asked Jimmy, not even sure he’d get any answer.

_Are you kidding me? You weak, egotistical bastard. Crawl back to him and beg him to clean up your mess._

Castiel recoiled back to the surface, spurned by the human’s clarity. He didn’t have to ask who ‘him’ was, they both knew each other’s thoughts like they were their own. He spread his wings before the words lost their brutal impact.

“I need help.”

And for a full ten seconds he held his breath, every cell in his body waiting for the inevitable rejection. But it didn’t come. Instead he nodded, silent but willing to help. More than he deserved.

And although he relented and they helped, it wasn’t enough. The Leviathan clung on, clawing at his insides, trying to break their way out. They pulled him back and tossed him into his own corner, leaving him in as sorry a state as they had left Jimmy.

He watched as his friends, if they would still allow themselves to be called that, were thrown around like discarded toys. That’s all they were to the Leviathan. Momentary entertainment made sweeter by the pain it caused their former host.

When he stopped trying to fight them and yielded, they left Dean and Sam and Bobby and walked his borrowed body towards their greater intent.

He watched as they walked him into the nearest water supply, he could even feel the cold water biting at his skin. They let him hear Dean running and pulling up short in front of the water, before they dragged him under it. They held him down, keeping him inside the vessel while they all left it. He felt like laughing at them, telling them they needn’t bother, he had no desire to go anywhere other than down. He wanted to fall, finally, until there really was no further to go.

The water took him and he buried himself as deep in the dark of Jimmy’s mind as he could, hoping that without his influence the universe would finally give in and let them go. 

For a while he got his wish, he ceased to be Castiel but like he always did, Dean found him and brought him back, kicking and screaming.


	4. Guilt from Said Short Lived God Complex

He wanted to stop at the time. He’d wanted to stop ever since he’d said yes to that infernal demon but everything stopped him from stopping. What would become of the human race if he didn’t do this, what would become of Dean?

That reasoning came back to haunt him when he unwillingly unleashed hell onto those people and lost Dean along the way.

He’d thought that despite all the regrettable things, despite all the bloodshed, he had to be doing good on some level. He had to do something. All the time while preaching free will, he himself had no path to follow. He had nobody to seek advice from. Somewhere deep down, he must have known he wasn’t sure of what he was doing, otherwise he would have told Dean about it, asked for their help.

But he didn’t. Was he ashamed or did he think they would be? Honestly, both. When had anything _good_ ever been instigated by Crowley? Or any demon? Was he any better than Sam had been by trusting the demon whore?

He thought he was better than all of them, he could control everything and in time, he would cut Crowley out, make Dean understand and bring peace on Earth.

He managed one out of the three and not the important one. Each time he tried, he made things irrevocably worse. And he didn’t bring the world any peace either.

He sometimes wondered what would have happened if he’d just gone to Heaven and killed Raphael outright and given the souls back like Dean asked him to. The Leviathan would have probably still clung on and he’d still end up in that reservoir but would it have made it easier for Dean to forgive him? If he hadn’t gone back to them and declared himself the new God, would Hester have had more mercy on him? Or would Inias have had less? Or would everything have been the same?

Sometimes he put too much thought into the acts that the Leviathan committed using him as a conduit. He saw the blood on his hands like it was still there. He was thankful for it. It made him finally admit he’d been wrong.

He put less thought into the acts he committed himself, he didn’t even want to admit that they had been all his. The Leviathan had just sat back and laughed while he made sinners choke on their tongues.

He wanted to ask Dean if he knew about all these little falls that led up to the big one but he wouldn’t be able to bear it if he said he did. He already had to look him in the eye knowing he’d nearly destroyed his brother, he couldn’t add anything more to that.

The insanity took the edge off slightly. He didn’t have to look if he didn’t want to. He didn’t have to examine anything too closely unless they made him. He tried to let Dean know he was sorry in a way that didn’t involve actually saying the words; he’d said them so many times before he was afraid they would lose all meaning.

Of course, the small gesture backfired tremendously and he realised he couldn’t fix what had been broken between them. It was up to Dean to decide when he was ready for that. At that moment, he was far from ready, everything was still too raw. He needed to leave.

When he did leave, he felt like he’d left something crucial behind. He could feel it, or rather the lack of it, inside him, like a black hole, sucking everything else in. He felt like he needed to go back to him, _make_ him understand. He hadn’t wanted this, it had just kind of happened along the way. He hated that time was too linear for him to go back and re-write it all.

Even back then the obvious answer was staring him in the face. _Trust Dean_. He’d spent the last few years trusting him; he’d rebelled against heaven for him, started and ended an apocalypse with him. Would another one have been that bad? As bad as what was happening to them now? Dean had said it himself; he’d taken some pretty big fish, maybe he could have taken Raphael. It could have been as simple as trapping him in a ring of holy fire and throwing Angel Blades at him until one of them hit. Could it have been that simple?

He wondered if in another year’s time he’d look back on him and Dean, avoiding each other’s eyes and skirting round the subject, and think; was saying sorry be that much harder than this?

Sometimes when he was feeling particularly inhuman, or possibly as most human as he could get, he didn’t care about what had brought them here like this. He only cared about Dean. Where they were and why he couldn’t just make everything disappear.

If he wanted to, he could spread his wings and never see Dean again. It would be what most Angels in his situation would do. If there ever had been any Angels in his situation. But he knew that even without seeing Dean, he’d never be free of him. He was always there, on the periphery of his thoughts, clawing his way to the forefront. Even if Castiel left, he would never truly be more than the shadow of a thought away. All it would take would be Dean praying for him or even thinking about him, and he’d come running back.

In a weird twisted way, Castiel wondered what the world would be like if Dean had been assigned to a different Angel. Would he be better for it? Would Dean?

He remembered what his life was like before Dean and he was glad that even now, he wouldn’t give one second of the last three years up. That had to be worth something, even if everything else had fallen apart. He only hoped that somehow, Dean felt the same.


	5. The Most Terrifying Fall There Is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Spoilers for 7x23.

It was difficult. He wanted to be at Dean’s side but he wasn’t sure Dean wanted him there. Then the circumstances demanded that he return to him and he did. He buried his head in the sand and refused to even broach what had happened between them but he was there.

Denial seemed like a cosy hole to sit in and it was a familiar place to him. He eyed the constant whisky glasses on the table and walked past them. Insanity was enough for now. Dean picked up one of the glasses. The action was as familiar to him as Cas’ denial was. For a moment, if he didn’t think too hard on it, things seemed almost normal.

Board games soothed him because the pieces did what he wanted them to. They didn’t suddenly snap at him and make him think about what he had done. They didn’t look at him with such intensity that he’d rather be in hell itself for all the torment he was feeling.

He wasn’t sure what to do. He wasn’t sure what Dean wanted to do. No, he knew what Dean wanted him to do, he just _couldn’t_ do it. So he placed himself in the hands of a game that would make that decision for him. Left foot red was easier to do than say no to Dean.

He knew sooner or later, they’d figure out what exactly it was that he was avoiding and then they’d give a big speech about responsibility and consequences. Then he’d have to choose between Dean and the world and it wouldn’t be the first time the world took a backseat to a Winchester.

He was glad Dean had taken him aside from that moment, so it was just between the two of them. He had a feeling it would have been difficult for them both to be honest had they not been alone.

He had been completely honest with him, and with himself, for the first time in so long it felt like a completely new experience. He told Dean why he couldn’t help and with a few words that he’d been imagining since he came back, Dean pulled him right back in and there he was saying he’d do what he could.

It wasn’t the magic fix-it that he wanted but it was the start of forgiveness. It was the longest awaited step on the path to letting himself be himself again. He finally felt like he didn’t have to bury himself in the insanity, he could just let it blend into the background.

Of course, these newfound beginnings of forgiveness might be based on the fact that they could die tomorrow. Castiel briefly wondered what would happen if they didn’t. Would Dean take it back? Could he take it back? Was that allowed by the human constraints of manners? Would Dean care?

He felt like asking ‘And what if we don’t die?” but he didn’t want answer. He wanted to bask in this tiny fragment of what humans would describe as happiness and just hope that someone up there liked him and he wouldn’t have to find out.

-x-

They had lived. Sort of. In theory, purgatory was for the dead _things/i > of the world but then the Leviathans had been put there alive, so maybe they had too. Castiel honestly didn’t know anymore._

They found shelter in a small cave, a small blessing of purgatory’s dismal design.

“What do we do now?”

“Wait and hope some fool gets it into his head to save the world by opening the door and letting us all out?” 

Dean laughed and Castiel looked at him sideways.

“That wasn’t meant to be funny was it? I can’t tell with you anymore.”

Castiel looked at him again and he could see that Dean was struggling to cope with the constant ups and downs.

“How are you doing, by the way? You seem less...” Dean made a noise and a hand gesture that was apparently meant to stand in for the word _insane_.

“I’m fine. I mean, I’m trapped in purgatory and half these creatures want to kill us because you put them here while the other half want to kill _me_ because I put them _back_ here. I also seem to have picked up a horrible clarity which won’t let me ignore that fact. Or the fact you still haven’t quite forgiven me enough for you to be completely comfortable with being trapped here with me. Whereas I’m not completely comfortable with being trapped here with you because I have come to the irrefutable conclusion that whenever I spend any length of time with you, it is detrimental to the world and apparently my mental health. I’m not entirely comfortable with the fact that despite you being such a hazard to me, I apparently keep coming back and making things worse for both of us. It’s also difficult to empathize with your hurt feelings over what I’ve done because I have to endure knowing I‘m the one that did it. You only have to accept that you had your trust betrayed; I have to live with the fact that I betrayed it. All the while, I have to reason with the fact that as an Angel I should not _care_ what you think or feel, yet it is more important to me than any other aspect of creation. Were I a human, I’d make my peace with the fact that I’ve done something as simple as found myself in love. As an Angel that has fallen so many times, my vessel experiences vertigo just thinking about it, I’m too scared to even entertain the _idea_ that on top of every other way I’ve fallen for you, I’ve fallen in love with you. Then add the impossibility that I shouldn’t even be _able_ to feel anything like that and yet I do and I’m pretty sure it’s ruined any chance I had of ever feeling _sane_ again and still, I find myself not caring as long as I’m with you.” He paused for breath. “So summarise; I’m fine. How are you?”

Castiel looked straight ahead, refusing to turn and look at Dean because if he did that would mean he couldn’t pretend all he’d said was _I’m fine_. Denial was an unusual mistress, one he longed to crawl back to at that particular moment.

“Me?” Dean said. “I’m _fine_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Table Of Doom prompt "Five Things" for [Writerverse](http://writerverse.livejournal.com)  
> 


End file.
